Listening to Duration: Bergson, Terry Riley, and the Sonic Evolution of Time

“Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.”
— Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time of duration (la durée) set out to rescue lived experience from the mechanical nature of the clock. For Bergson, true time is not a measurable succession of small instants but a living flow, something that moves and changes like our own consciousness. Time is not a number, but a feeling, a movement, a life that grows. Time, he says, is qualitative, not quantitative; it is the substance of consciousness itself.

This idea has inspired many artists in different forms: theatre, cinema, performance  but here I want to speak about how it has influenced music, especially minimal and experimental music. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, many musicians have made Bergson’s idea of duration into sound itself. From Terry Riley’s early minimalist cycles to the long-form drones and meditative pieces of Éliane Radigue, to the more recent Sarah Davachi, and Kali Malone to the dense, jarring and decaying textures of Tim Hecker, Ben Frost, Thomas Köner and Muslimgauze, their music does not represent time: it is time. In listening, time is not marked by a cadence - we live in it! Their music allows us to understand and experience duration as living movement rather than a constructed sequence.

In the mid-1960s, Terry Riley created a radical alternative to the fast-moving trends of the time. His famous work In C (1964) set aside the idea of a musical story with a beginning and an end. Its 53 melodic patterns can be repeated ad infinitum by any number of performers, producing constantly shifting rhythmic and harmonic compositions. The result is a constantly changing texture, where nothing is fixed and everything moves. The music never stops growing; it just changes its colour, its rhythm, its light.

In Riley’s sound, Bergson’s duration becomes something we can hear. Each note and pattern overlaps with the echoes of the previous ones. The listener does not feel time as a straight line but as a living moment, infused with presence. Every repetition changes slightly the meaning of what came before like memory itself, always moving.

Works such as A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969) or his keyboard improvisations further explore this idea of sound as living movement. Their pulses and loops seem to invite us into a state of flow, where our attention floats freely and time feels alive inside the music. Riley, in this sense, transforms Bergson’s theory into a practice of listening. Time is no longer an external frame; it is what the music is made of.

For Bergson, the artist’s true task is not to describe movement, but to feel it from within. Real understanding comes not from analysis but from intuition; by entering the flow of life itself. This principle live not only in Terry Riley’s improvisatory systems but also in the methods of later composers and sound artists influenced by this temporal way of thinking:

Éliane Radigue, with analog synthesizers, listens very patiently to sound. Her music changes so slowly that sometimes we are not sure if it changes at all, but we feel the movement inside it. Kali Malone do something similar with organs, strings, and voices. Their sounds grow and breathe until the harmonies find a natural balance. The composer becomes one listener among others, following the sound’s own will. Ben Frost and Tim Hecker, operating in a digital and textural range, apply similar intuition to the edge of collapse: distortion, feedback, and decay evolve as living, unpredictable processes. Muslimgauze’s vast rhythmic catalog transforms repetition into a living, self-regenerating organism. In everyone of these works, intuition and organic movement replaces control. The artist collaborates with the material: the voltage, the air, reverbs and random pattern sequence to unveil what Bergson called creative evolution: the continuous invention of form from within the flow of life itself.

One of Bergson’s key ideas, later taken up by Deleuze, is that true repetition never produces identity. Each recurrence alters the whole; time is creative, not reproductive. This idea plays a big role in Riley’s ouvre. In In C, repeating a phrase does not return it unchanged, every reiteration modifies context, timbre, and phase relation.In the drones of Radigue, Davachi, or Malone, repetition slows until variation becomes nearly imperceptible, the modulation of tones and shifts of overtone create nuances and gradation that transform the listener’s perception. Conversely, Frost and Hecker accelerate the same process: reflexive noise, rhythmic density, and digital corrosion create emergent difference through overload. Muslimgauze’s hypnotic, repetitive percussive rhythms operate through difference loops so obsessive that they start to fracture from within.

In Bergsonian terms, this is difference in kind, not degree. The “same” sound continually becomes other, as each moment of listening carries the memory of those before. The ear experiences what Bergson called creative becoming  transformation without discontinuity.

In Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson describes life as an élan vital, a continuous surge of creative energy driving the universe’s self-differentiation. This “vital impulse” is not mechanical causality but spontaneous invention, a movement of perpetual creation. Much of the music descended from Riley embodies this vital impulse. Sound is not static material but energetic life:

• In Radigue’s analog synthesis, oscillations breathe and evolve like living organisms.

• Malone and Davachi treat harmonic sound as organic growth - tones bloom and decay with quiet inevitability.

• Hecker and Frost render the same life force as entropy: the vitality of matter consuming itself.

• Köner’s subzero drones embody the life of stillness — the slow motion of ice, the planetary pulse.

• Muslimgauze, the life force of rhythm and political urgency.
  
  

In all cases, sound is not an object but a process,  an acoustic translation of Bergson’s living flux. Listening is participation in the world’s continuous act of creation.

In Matter and Memory (1896), Bergson dissolves the strict division between mind and matter, proposing that perception is a continuation of the world’s vibration. Consciousness and material reality share the same movement. This insight finds sonic form in the immersive materiality of these composers. Riley’s loops envelop the listener in a field of vibration; one ceases to stand apart from the sound. Davachi and Malone record the resonances of rooms and organs as if capturing memory embedded in air. Köner’s frozen textures turn sound into landscape — matter remembering its own movement. Hecker’s distorted layers are haunted by their own decay: digital matter reflecting on its disintegration. These works make Bergson’s metaphysics perceptible. The listener’s consciousness doesn’t interpret the sound; it becomes part of its vibration.


Two Currents of Bergsonian Sound

Vital Continuity (organic duration, resonance, stillness)
Riley — Radigue — Davachi — Malone
Time as contemplation, breathing, interiority

Energetic Flux (entropy, transformation, intensity)
Riley — Hecker — Frost — Köner —Muslimgauze
Time as turbulence, decay, emergence

Both stem from the same philosophical root: time as creation. One explores the slow unfolding of being; the other, its continual reconfiguration.From Bergson’s intuition of duration to Riley’s cyclic improvisations and the vast resonant worlds of contemporary drone and ambient artists, a clear through-line emerges: music as the experience of becoming. These musicians do not illustrate Bergson’s ideas — they perform them. They turn philosophical notions into audible reality:

• Time as flow rather than measure,

• Repetition as creation,

• Matter as vibration,

• Sound as life.
  

To listen to Riley, Radigue, Davachi, Malone, Hecker, Frost, Köner or Muslimgauze is to enter a Bergsonian world, one where consciousness, matter, and sound dissolve into the same continuous field of energy. Here, time is not something that passes by; it is something that lives through us.

References

·       Bergson, Henri (1911). Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. London: Macmillan & Co.

·       Bergson, Henri (1911). Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul & W. Scott Palmer. London: George Allen & Unwin.

·       Bergson, Henri (1910). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen & Unwin.

·       Deleuze, Gilles (1994). Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press.

·       Davachi, S. (2020) Cantus, Descant [album]. New York: Late Music.

·       Frost, B. (2007) Theory of Machines [album]. Iceland: Bedroom Community.

·       Hecker, T. (2011) Ravedeath, 1972 [album]. Chicago: Kranky.

·       Kali Malone (2019) The Sacrificial Code [album]. Stockholm: Ideal Recordings.

·       Köner, T. (1992) Teimo [album]. Germany: Barooni.

·       Muslimgauze (1996) Uzbekistani Bizarre and Souk [album]. Netherlands: Staalplaat.

·       Radigue, É. (2005) Adnos I–III [album]. New York: Table of the Elements.

·       Riley, T. (1964) In C [musical score]. New York: Associated Music Publishers.

·       Riley, T. (1969) A Rainbow in Curved Air [album]. New York: Columbia Records.